Russia sends ‘assassin’ after man who betrayed Anna Chapman
The Kremlin has reportedly dispatched an assassin to catch up with the Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other spies this summer.
The reputable Russian newspaper Kommersant has quoted a high-ranking Kremlin source saying: “We know where he is and who he is”.
The source adds: “You can have no doubt – a Mercader has already been sent after him.” Ramon Mercader was hired by the KGB to kill Leon Trotsky with an icepick in Mexico in 1940.
Kommersant said that the double agent in question – named as Colonel Shcherbakov – led the branch of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, which oversees longtime agents working without diplomatic cover in the US – among them Chapman and the other nine. The presence of such a high-level double agent in their ranks would be a serious failure of Russian intelligence.
“Traitors always meet bad ends.” Vladimir Putin
A senior Russian lawmaker – Gennadi Gudkov – told the Interfax news agency: “Directorate S, whose US division was led by Shcherbakov, has never known such a failure. This directorate is the holy of holies in the intelligence business, and it works on producing deep-cover agents, whose training and legalisation sometimes takes decades.”
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Fled to US
It’s believed that Shcherbakov fled to the US shortly before the arrest of the spies in suburban America caused a sensation in late June. All ten were later returned to Russia in exchange for the release of four men jailed for allegedly spying for the CIA and MI6. At the time, the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticised the “treachery” that led to their unmasking and warned “traitors always meet bad ends”.
If true, reports that Shcherbakov’s son resigned from a job with a Russian drug control agency to fly to the United States shortly before the spy ring was revealed will be of little comfort to Russian spy chiefs now left wondering how they missed the clues pointing to such a serious intelligence betrayal.